Call for Participation
In the research community we are often very interested to see our tools and ideas be used by a wider audience. Yet, once ideas and tools have been published and made available, stories about how these tools and ideas are applied by various user groups rarely reach a wider audience.
In order to help us distribute more broadly how visualization impacts people's work or lives, leads to decisions being made, or actions being taken, VisWeek (arguably the largest and most prestigious visualization conference) now hosts the Discovery Exhibition. In contrast to a common academic contribution at a conference, however, the goal of an entry to the Discovery Exhibit is not to describe a visualization or vis tool per se but to share how it has impacted the people using it. Sharing these stories will help us better understand how visualization research can impact the world and provide our community with tangible experiences to communicate on the impact of our research. For students, this venue provides a great opportunity to meet real users and understand how infovis systems can change their life and get exposure in our research community through an archived entry (published on the Discovery Exhibition website) and a poster at the conference. Accepted authors will also benefit from presentation time at the conference to present their stories and findings.
What?
The content of a discovery submission is not about a visualization tool itself. Indeed, we strongly encourage students to even study the impact of tools built by others such as ManyEyes, Tableau, or Excel!
The discovery exhibit focuses on the impact of the visualization on real users. The successful submission focuses on how visualization impacts people's work or lives and contains details on the discoveries made by people, the insights they found in their data using information visualization, how these lead to decisions being made or actions being taken.
Submission format:
- A 2-4-page write-up following the VisWeek poster template.
- The write-up should focus on: the domain and data, insights/discoveries/findings and process in which they were acquired, impact of visualization use, and representations, interactions, and tools used if any. Since we focus on discoveries and impact of Infovis, at least half of your entry is required to be dedicated to these points. This means you can only use less than half of your paper to present your tool itself – focus has to be placed on the impact stories.
- Optional video submissions that explain your contribution.
- Please check this website frequently for updated information on submission templates, dates, FAQ, and examples.
May I have a concrete example, please?
As a brief example, an entry could talk about insights made by a group of environmental scientists trying to find a cause of global warming using the GeoViz Toolkit or Improvise. This submission would answer questions such as:
- What discoveries have they made using the tool? What have they learned about global warming that they did not know before?
When
The deadline for submission is July 19th, 2010
How
Please submit your entry to the following address: discovery_exhibition@vgtc.org
If you plan to submit video figures, please upload them to a web server and send us a link to download the file.